Jake Kennedy
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Oct 14/02) - When he got a call from Aurora College looking for an RCMP recruiting poster, officer Cpl. Wayne Norris thought it would be as easy as dusting off a couple of old posters.

But when he looked around the RCMP "G" Division headquarters in Yellowknife, he realized that there no recruiting posters geared towards aboriginals from Northern communities.

Norris, an Inuvialuit from Inuvik, decided he would have to make his own aboriginal recruiting poster.

"I got to thinking that's what we need to do, to try and give some encouragement to the youth in our aboriginal communities," Norris said.

He knew funding would be a problem, but quickly worked out a deal with the Aboriginal Workforce Participation Initiative from the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs.

On Oct. 2, Norris unveiled the poster he helped to develop. It features pictures of aboriginal RCMP officers across the NWT.

"You look at that poster, you can be from just about anywhere in the territories and there'll be someone you recognize on it," Norris said.

Norris signed on to the RCMP after his friend, Merle Carpenter, also an Inuvialuit from Inuvik, joined.

Both he and Merle, Norris said, were inspired to join the RCMP by Merle's father, Frank, who was with the RCMP for more than 20 years.

And Norris's two younger brothers also joined the RCMP and are now stationed in Yellowknife.

Norris said his 16 years with the RCMP, all of them in Northern communities, has taught him that people in the North like to know the officers who are policing them.

"If we can make things easier for the people in the communities by having a smiling face that they know, then let's do that."

Of course, Norris is the first to admit that being from an RCMP member in a small Northern community where you are a familiar face can also have its downside.

"I spent my first four years in my hometown of Inuvik," he said. "A lot of people there knew my face, and sometimes a couple of them would give me grief."

Currently, 27 of the NWT RCMP's 161 regular members are aboriginal. And of those 27 aboriginal members, 12 are from the NWT.

"We do have a large group of aboriginal members within the NWT," Norris said, although he adds that he'd like to see more.

Norris said the NWT RCMP have recently added a new recruiting officer, whose primary goal is to bring more Northerners to the force.

Violet Pokiak, an aboriginal from Tuktoyaktuk, will join the RCMP force in Yellowknife as a recruiting officer in the next couple of weeks, once she has completed a training session in Saskatchewan.